Tag Archives: Iranian Quds force

The last time Iranian and American forces were in Iraq, the two sides quietly fought each other. Now Iran’s Quds Force officers in Iraq are purposely leaving the Americans alone.

Pay no attention to the Shi’ite militias threatening to kill U.S. troops in Iraq. The elite Iranian forces backing those militias have been ordered not to attack the Americans.

That’s the conclusion of the latest U.S. intelligence assessment for Iraq. And it represents a stunning turnaround for Iran’s Quds Force, once considered America’s most dangerous foe in the region.

U.S. intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast that the apparent Iranian decision not to target American troops inside Iraq reflects Iran’s desire to strike a nuclear bargain with the United States and the rest of the international community before the current negotiations expire at the end of November.

“They are not going after Americans,” one senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast familiar with the recent assessments. “They want the nuclear talks to succeed and an incident between our guys and their guys would not be good for those talks.”

The Quds Force, named for the Arabic word for Jerusalem, are believed to have hundreds of troops in Iraq. As the primary arm of the Iranian state that supports allied terrorist organizations, their operatives worried Obama’s predecessor so much that the Treasury Department began sanctioning its members in 2007 for sabotaging the government of Iraq. The U.S. military accused the Quds Force of orchestrating cells of terrorists in Iraq. In 2012, Wired magazine dubbed Quds Force leader Qassem Suleimani the most dangerous person on the planet. In 2013, the New Yorker arrived at a similar conclusion, and claimed he has “directed Assad’s war in Syria.”

More recently, the Treasury Department has accused the Quds Force of international heroin trafficking and conducting terrorism and intelligence operations against the Afghanistan government. That’s why it’s so extraordinary that the Quds Force would be perceived to be laying off U.S. forces in Iraq.

But in some ways, the assessment is not surprising. Both Iran and the United States share a common enemy in the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). In late August, U.S. airpower and Iranian-backed militias broke the ISIS siege on the town of Amerli. Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, was photographed in Amerli, after the town was liberated from ISIS.

The latest assessments from the U.S. intelligence community also interpret Iran’s behavior in part as linked to the ongoing negotiations between Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and China.

A U.S. intelligence official said the Quds Force behavior was the equivalent of a confidence building measure, a diplomatic term that refers to a concession offered to improve the atmosphere of negotiations. (Iran had already offered to play a more “active role” in the regional fight against ISIS, in exchange for nuclear concessions.)

When Americans think about the illegal drug trade and black markets in Mexico, it is probable that they do not associate them with terrorism, or Islamic fundamentalism. One would think that drug cartels like Los Zetas, the most sophisticated and second most powerful drug cartel in Mexico would have enough allies and connections not to need the assistance of an organization like Hezbollah based half way across the world in Lebanon. However, there is proof that Hezbollah, as well as elements of the Iranian Quds force are functioning with cartels like Los Zetas, the most sophisticated drug cartel in Mexico. The combination of power hungry cartels like Los Zetas, and terrorist organizations like Hezbollah who want a presence in North America, in or near the United States inhibit U.S. companies from wanting to conduct business in Mexico, and should not remain unnoticed.

The question is, how did this deadly alliance come into existence? For decades, immigrants, legal and illegal, have been arriving in Mexico from Lebanon. This population has been growing steadily, and has a certain level of favorability with Hezbollah. One of the creations of Hezbollah in Mexico is that of well-connected global drug dealers, like Ayman Joumaa. Joumaa, indicted in 2011 is of Lebanese heritage, and has been linked to Hezbollah, and Mexico’s Los Zetas cartel. With the help of the Los Zetas, and companies like The Lebanese Canadian Bank, Ayman Joumaa has laundered between $850 and $900 million.

Joumaa is known among Israeli intelligence as being in contact with Hezbollah elite forces, and was connected to senior operatives handling Hezbollah drug operations. He has received bulk payments of U.S. dollars in Mexico City after coordinating drug shipments from South America to the Los Zetas cartel, receiving a cut for laundering and camouflaging funds. Drug and contraband profits were disguised through the trading and selling of used cars through an exchange in Africa with the help of Beirut exchange houses. Eventually, similar fraud rings connected to Joumaa were discovered throughout North and South America, and the Middle East. Various methods of investment fraud are typically used by drug dealers to cover their tracks. Many fraud rings use creative investment tactics that can pass as legal activity if not scrutinized. One such operation involved the selling of thorough-bred horses to cover up the trade of millions of dollars in fraudulent drug money.

Since 2005, Iran and Hezbollah have developed a presence in Latin America, opening 17 cultural centers, and forming relations with the Mexican drug cartels. 200,000 immigrants from Lebanon and Syria, many of whom are illegal residents, live in Mexico, and have established residence with the help of drug cartels like Los Zetas, the most technically advanced of Mexico’s drug cartels. Those who are sympathetic to Islamic extremist movements make perfect recruits for the drug trade because they understand how illegal activity in the Americas empowers whoever wishes to weaken the power of U.S. sovereignty. As shown by the increase of Islamic missionaries in Mexico, as well as the growing influence of Hezbollah and Iran, it is clear that Islamists are trying to win the hearts and minds of the Mexican people. However, beneath these seemingly peaceful developments lie the fact that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard and Quds forces are partnering with major Mexican drug cartels. They are learning Mexican culture, as well as Spanish, and are starting to blend in with native-born Mexicans.

They are all examples of hostile action by a global Shi’ite terrorist network, which is larger and more organized than any Sunni al-Qaida-inspired group currently in existence.

The following examples include known recent attempted attacks:

February 2012: Two Iranians turn an apartment in Bangkok, Thailand into an explosives factory and plan to assassinate Israeli diplomats. Their plan is botched after Thai police receive intelligence about the plot. One of the terrorists tries to flee police with explosives and loses his legs after a failed attempt to hurl a grenade at officers. His accomplice is later arrested in neighboring Malaysia while trying to board a flight. The men are currently on trial in Thailand.

February 2012: The wife of an Israeli diplomat is seriously injured after a terrorist attaches a magnet bomb to her vehicle in New Delhi, India. Indian authorities have arrested an Indian-Muslim journalist with ties to the official Iranian Islamic Republic News Agency in connection with the attack.

On the same day, an Israeli embassy staffer in Tbilisi, Georgia discovered a bomb underneath his car as he was driving to the embassy Monday morning.

May 2008: Azerbaijan arrests two Lebanese Hizballah members for plotting attacks on the Israeli embassy in Baku. The men are later sentenced to 15 years behind bars.

October 2012: Azerbaijan sentences 22 of its citizens to lengthy jail sentences after convicting them of assisting the Iranian Republican Guards Corps to plan attacks on the Israeli and American embassies.

July 2012: Five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver are murderedby a Hizballah bomber who attacked their tour bus at the resort city of Burgas. The attack occurs just outside of an airport, after the tourists landed on a plane from Israel. Bulgaria later blames Hizballah for the atrocity, and announces a manhunt for two suspected members of the cell who assisted the bomber. The bomber is killed in the blast.

February 2013: A Cypriot court sentences a Lebanese national to four years in prison after he was caught making reconnaissance trips to the Mediterranean island’s airport, to track and record the movement of Israeli passengers. The plot’s intended victims and methodology closely resemble the ‘soft target’ approach taken by Hizballah in Bulgaria.

Yaakov Lappin is the Jerusalem Post’s military and national security affairs correspondent, and author ofThe Virtual Caliphate (Potomac Books), which proposes that jihadis on the internet have established a virtual Islamist state.

“History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid” – Gen. Eisenhower.

The Iranians and their terrorist proxy Hezbollah has been building forward operating bases in the Tri-Border area of South America and Mexico for the last three decades. Venezuela’s uranium deposits have been an important and rarely reported on component fueling Iran’s efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people in Latin America and Mexico.

Iranian Press Expose the Hispanic Insurgency

Sending young Iranian clerics to Latin American countries to spread Iranian-style radical Shi’ite Islam: To prepare for such missions, clerics train for three years, and study a variety of subjects to help them in their activity in Latin America: Spanish, religions and cultures of Latin America, and skills for converting Spanish speakers to Islam. In February 2012 Hojjat-ol-Eslam Ruhollah Maheri, the deputy director of the institute, announced that registration was open for the eighth course. Those interested were asked to call the institute or send an application form by email (AmuzehSpanish@gmail.com). (Rasa News Agency, 2/15/2012)(ITIC)

Of growing concern are Hezbollah, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Quds Force, partnering with Mexican and South American drug syndicates, joining in lucrative drug, gun running, counterfeiting, and human trafficking operations. Out of these associations, Islamic terrorist groups are making hundreds of millions of dollars while exploiting our Mexican border and entering the United States at any time of their choosing, often cloaked as illegal immigrants.

The U.S. government also wishes to develop relations between U.S. Muslim community leaders and the Muslim communities in Brazil. They hope that by fostering a connection they will “bolster mainstream Islam in Brazil, highlight the importance of freedom of religion in America, the diversity of Islam in America, and debunk the myths that exist about Islam in America.” Additionally it would further the Sao Paulo Muslim community’s effort to spread its “interfaith relations… with other Muslim communities around the World.”

“Post, Karen Chandler, has suggested several possible programs, including a campaign to provide consular information to Muslim contacts, a series of outreach presentations on President Obama, and, most important, our desire to bring down a visiting U.S. Sheik who can explain how Islam is now a vital part of American society and build ties with local religious leaders. Given its size, diversity and traditions of cultural tolerance, Brazil could be an excellent testing ground for programs that might be useful to other WHA posts with similar Muslim minority populations.”

Obama and State Department Arrogance and Idiocy Towards Political Islam

The United States is an Infidel nation, following man made laws, in direct violation of Islamic Law. For President Obama’s Foreign Policy team to think we can “influence Hezbollah Islam in Brazil by promoting the diversity of Islam in America” as a force multiplier across the South America region to counter the Hezbollah power base in the tri-border area, is patently absurd and quite dangerous.

Our State Department articulates they will achieve this naive objective above by doing a “series of outreach presentations on President Obama and bringing down a U.S. Sheik to say how important Islam is to American Society.”

The WikiLeaks memo above focuses a neon light on how utterly ignorant our State Department officials are about the Islamic Threat Doctrine, Hezbollah, Al-Queda, and the Muslim Brotherhood. American policy makers believe this mythical form of Infidel U.S. friendly Islam will out Islam the truer Islam of Iran is like the Keystone Cops giving tactical training to the Navy SEAL’s.

Hezbollah is currently sending Jihadis through the porous Mexican / U.S. Border creating a national security risk which The Obama Administration refuses to name, much less address and counter.

Photo sent to Christine Levinson, wife of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who was kidnapped in Iran 6 years ago.

by Clare M. Lopez

Startling photos of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared in March 2007 while on a trip to Iran’s Kish Island in the Persian Gulf, are the latest evidence in a litany of American hostages, taken, held and sometimes murdered by the Iranian mullahs and their terror proxies over a period of more than three decades.

Broadcast on the Fox News Greta Van Susteren program on January 8, 2013, the two-year-old Levinson photos show a haggard man with wildly unkempt graying hair and beard in chains and wearing an orange jumpsuit.

His wife, Christine, who was Van Susteren’s guest, described her conviction that her husband is still alive even though U.S. officials have said little publicly in the nearly six years since Levinson was kidnapped.

A 22-year FBI veteran, Levinson worked as a private investigator after his 1998 retirement from government service. Although in the region on an assignment for Global Witness, a London-based group that investigates corporate and government corruption, Levinson decided to fly to Kish Island after spending several days on assignment looking into a cigarette smuggling case in Dubai.

On Kish Island, he reportedly was scheduled to meet with Dawud Salahuddin (born David Belfield), an African-American convert to Islam and wanted fugitive for the July 1980 contract murder of Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former press attaché at the Iranian Embassy in Washington, who became an outspoken critic of the Khomeini regime in the months following the overthrow of the Shah.

One day after meeting with Salahuddin, Levinson disappeared and, before these latest photos, had been seen only in a 2010 videotape and some earlier photographs that were made public in December 2011. In the tape, a gaunt Levinson asked for U.S. government help in meeting the (unspecified) demands of his captors, whose identity is not mentioned.

The FBI has offered a $1 million reward for information leading to Levinson’s safe recovery and return and the Department of State also is involved in working with the Iranian government to secure his release. In a 2011 statement, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said American officials had received indications that Mr. Levinson “is being held somewhere in southwest Asia.”

According to FOX News now, that statement was a red herring, improbably intended as a “goodwill gesture to Iran,” by suggesting that Al-Qaeda or other terrorists were holding Levinson. In her January 8, 2013 interview with Van Susteren, Christine Levinson said she believes that her husband is being held in Iran.

U.S. officials, cited by FOX, judge that the Iranian intelligence service, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), likely is behind both Levinson’s kidnapping and the email transmission of his photos and video to the family.

The FBI, which insists that Levinson was not working for the U.S. government at the time of his kidnapping, claims it does not know who is holding Levinson or what their demands might be. The Iranian regime, of course, denies knowing anything about Levinson.

The December 2006 seizure and imprisonment of Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East Program, demonstrated another variation on the Iranian regime’s predilection for kidnapping American citizens. This time, it targeted an Iranian-American academic whose U.S. citizenship was no protection.

Imprisoned for 105 days after her passport was stolen in Tehran, Esfandiari had been a regular visitor to Iran, where her elderly mother lived. In her case, the regime seemed to want to register its pique at U.S. programs it viewed as supportive of regime change in Iran—although the Wilson Center would seem an odd target for such a charge. In any case, Esfandiari was released unharmed in August 2007 after her mother put up her Tehran apartment to pay the “bail” (ransom).

The Roxana Saberi case showed the Iranian regime continuing its pattern of seizing Americans and sometimes using them as bargaining chips to obtain the release of its own operatives being held in detention. Saberi is a U.S. citizen who was working as a journalist in Iran when she was arrested in January 2009. Although Saberi holds dual U.S.-Iranian citizenship, Iran refuses to recognize dual citizenship and insists on treating such individuals solely as Iranian subjects.

She initially was charged with working without press credentials but three months later, an Iranian judge brought far more serious charges of espionage on behalf of the U.S. against her. After a brief “trial,” Saberi was sentenced to an eight-year prison term.

There was something that Iran badly wanted, though, and that was the release of five IRGC Qods Force commanders, who’d been caught coordinating terrorist attacks in Iraq that killed hundreds of Americans.

The so-called “Irbil Five” (detained by American forces in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil in 2007), were senior Qods Force commanders, acting on orders from the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They were responsible for providing Iranian-manufactured EFPs (Explosively Formed Projectiles) to terror militias in Iraq to maim and kill Americans.

Further, these five Qods Force commanders not only coordinated the supply of Iranian EFPs but also acted as terror liaison and military advisors to local Iraqi terrorists as well as Al-Qaeda units.

Roxana Saberi became the bargaining chip for the release of these terrorists. In May 2009, the Iranian press reported that Vali Nasr, a senior advisor of Iranian heritage in the Obama administration, was in Iran. Saberi’s case was sent up on appeal to an Iranian appeals court, a hearing was held on May 10, 2009, and voila! – her charges were reduced to possession of classified information, and her sentence was reduced to two years, suspended.

Saberi was released the next day and flew home to the U.S. Two months later, in July 2009, President Obama freed the Irbil Five, swapping Iranian terror masters responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of American deaths and injuries, for one innocent American citizen hostage.

Clare Lopez is a senior fellow at RadicalIslam.org and a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on the Middle East, national defense and counterterrorism. Lopez served for 20 years as an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).